Affirmed
Ben Backes
Journal of Human Resources, Spring 2012, Pages 435-455
Abstract:
Using institutional data on race-specific college enrollment and completion, I examine whether minority students were less likely to enroll in a four-year public college or receive a degree following a statewide affirmative action ban. As in previous studies, I find that black and Hispanic enrollment dropped at the top institutions; however, there is little evidence that overall black enrollment at public universities fell. Finally, despite evidence that fewer blacks and Hispanics graduated from college following a ban, the effects on graduation rates are very noisy.
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Entrepreneurial Finance, Credit Cards and Race
Ronnie Chatterji & Robert Seamans
Journal of Financial Economics, forthcoming
Abstract:
This paper examines the impact of financial deregulation on entrepreneurship. We assess the impact of credit card deregulation on transitions into self-employment using state level removal of credit card interest rate ceilings following the U.S. Supreme Court's 1978 Marquette decision as a quasi-natural experiment. We find that credit card deregulation increases the probability of entrepreneurial entry, with a particularly strong effect for black entrepreneurs. We demonstrate that these effects are magnified in states with a history of racial discrimination, and link the results to discrimination-based barriers to entry.
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Black longshoremen and the fight for equality in an 'anti-racist' union
Jake Alimahomed-Wilson
Race & Class, April-June 2012, Pages 39-53
Abstract:
This paper uncovers the contradictions between official 'anti-racist' union principles and local practice by exploring the ways that racism shaped a racially progressive union's politics. Using interview material, it centres on the past and present experiences of African American union members working as longshoremen in southern California. Contrary to accounts that locate racism and the racial division of workers solely as a practice utilised by capital, the author argues that it was the labour union local itself, not capital, that readily relied on racism to undermine Black workers, thereby recreating the very same destructive forces that the International Longshore and Warehouse Union's principles purported to oppose.
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When the Levee Breaks: Labor Mobility and Economic Development in the American South
Richard Hornbeck & Suresh Naidu
Harvard Working Paper, January 2012
Abstract:
The availability of low-wage immobile labor may discourage economic development. In the American South, post-bellum economic stagnation has been partially attributed to white landowners' access to immobile low-wage black workers; indeed, subsequent Southern economic convergence was associated with substantial black out-migration. This paper estimates that the 1927 Mississippi flood caused immediate and persistent out-migration of black workers from flooded counties. Following this decline in the availability of low-wage black labor, landowners in flooded counties dramatically mechanized and modernized agricultural production relative to landowners in nearby similar non-flooded counties. The temporary displacement of black workers led to a permanent economic transition, though landowners had incentives to discourage black out-migration and maintain a system of labor-intensive agricultural production.
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The Impact of Slavery on Racial Inequality in Poverty in the Contemporary U.S. South
Heather O'Connell
Social Forces, forthcoming
Abstract:
Despite Civil Rights legislation, racial inequality persists, especially in the context of poverty. This study advances the literature on racial inequality and the Southern legacy of slavery by examining slavery's relationship with inequality in poverty. I analyze county-level U.S. Census data using regression and spatial data analysis techniques. I find the 1860 slave concentration is related to contemporary black-white inequality in poverty, independent of contemporary demographic and economic conditions, racialized wealth disparities and racial threat. My research suggests the importance of slavery for shaping existing U.S. racial inequality patterns. Insights derived from this research, including the formulation of legacy as a place-based, continuous phenomenon that is distinct from racial threat, provide the basis for future research on legacy's mechanisms.
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The Electoral Consequences of Skin Color: The "Hidden" Side of Race in Politics
Vesla Weaver
Political Behavior, March 2012, Pages 159-192
Abstract:
Despite the significant role that skin color plays in material well-being and social perceptions, scholars know little if anything about whether skin color and afrocentric features influence political cognition and behavior and specifically, if intraracial variation in addition to categorical difference affects the choices of voters. Do more phenotypically black minorities suffer an electoral penalty as they do in most aspects of life? This study investigates the impact of color and phenotypically black facial features on candidate evaluation, using a nationally representative survey experiment of over 2000 whites. Subjects were randomly assigned to campaign literature of two opposing candidates, in which the race, skin color and features, and issue stance of candidates was varied. I find that afrocentric phenotype is an important, albeit hidden, form of bias in racial attitudes and that the importance of race on candidate evaluation depends largely on skin color and afrocentric features. However, like other racial cues, color and black phenotype don't influence voters' evaluations uniformly but vary in magnitude and direction across the gender and partisan makeup of the electorate in theoretically explicable ways. Ultimately, I argue, scholars of race politics, implicit racial bias, and minority candidates are missing an important aspect of racial bias.
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Performance Pay and the White-Black Wage Gap
John Heywood & Daniel Parent
Journal of Labor Economics, April 2012, Pages 249-290
Abstract:
We show that the reported tendency for performance pay to be associated with greater wage inequality at the top of the earnings distribution applies only to white workers. This results in the white-black wage differential among those in performance pay jobs growing over the earnings distribution even as the same differential shrinks over the distribution for those not in performance pay jobs. We show that this remains true even when examining suitable counterfactuals that hold observables constant between whites and blacks. We explore reasons behind our finding focusing on the interactions between discrimination, unmeasured ability, and selection.
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The dynamics of the evolution of the Black-White test score gap
Kitae Sohn
Education Economics, March 2012, Pages 175-188
Abstract:
We apply a quantile version of the Oaxaca-Blinder decomposition to estimate the counterfactual distribution of the test scores of Black students. In the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, Kindergarten Class of 1998-1999 (ECLS-K), we find that the gap initially appears only at the top of the distribution of test scores. As children age, however, the gap at the top shrinks whereas the gap in the middle part of the distribution grows. Moreover, the gap due to differences in the effect, rather than amount, of characteristics becomes important.
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Isolates and Crosses in Human Population Genetics; or, A Contextualization of German Race Science
Veronika Lipphardt
Current Anthropology, April 2012, Pages S69-S82
Abstract:
Historians have drawn a line between scientific racism, exemplified in the typological approach of German race scientists, and population-based approaches toward races or human genetic diversity. The postwar time is often understood as a watershed in this respect. My argument is that typological and population-based race concepts cannot be so easily segregated either before or after World War II. In spite of noteworthy differences between the two, on closer inspection, one finds population-based concepts in German race science before World War II as well as typologies and typological aspects in human population genetics after World War II, and continuities between them. In this paper I aim at viewing German race science in its contemporary international context up to the 1960s. With regard to its theoretical groundings, research problems, research designs, methods, practices, results, and interpretations, German race science was far more embedded in contemporary research on human diversity around the world than is generally assumed. Most notably, researchers in the field have been preoccupied with identifying and examining "isolated" and "mixed" populations from the mid-nineteenth century until the present. Yet instead of rendering German race science harmless, this contextualization aims at drawing attention to the generally precarious aspects of research into "human variation" or "human diversity."
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Meritocracy, Self-Concerns, and Whites' Denial of Racial Inequity
Eric Knowles & Brian Lowery
Self and Identity, Spring 2012, Pages 202-222
Abstract:
We propose that embracing meritocracy as a distribution rule causes Whites to deny the existence of racial inequity. On this view, Whites who endorse meritocracy seek to regard themselves as high in merit, and maintain this self-view by denying racial privilege. Four studies show that preference for meritocracy better predicts denial of White privilege than anti-Black discrimination (Study 1), that the desire to see the self as meritorious mediates the relationship between preference for meritocracy and denial of privilege (Study 2), that this meritocracy-privilege relationship is moderated by Whites' need to bolster the self (Study 3), and that priming the meritocracy norm reduces perceptions of racial privilege among highly identified Whites (Study 4). Implications for the amelioration of social inequity are discussed.
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Only Here for the Day: The Social Integration of Minority Students at a Majority White High School
Megan Holland
Sociology of Education, April 2012, Pages 101-120
Abstract:
This study uses qualitative data to investigate the process of social integration for minority students at a majority white high school and identifies significant gender differences in this process. At this school, integration is the result of processes that occur at two different levels of interaction. On the interpersonal level, African American and Latino/a males and females engage in very different integration strategies. Males are able to gain social status at the school through their participation in athletics and their physical embodiment of the urban "hip-hop star" and also by engaging in strategies to play down negative stereotypes. In contrast, females do not have access to similar avenues for social status and do not engage in such strategies. The organization of the school contributes to these gender differences by facilitating interracial contact for the males under ideal conditions, while providing the females with less opportunity for contact. This study has implications for future work on integrated schools and points to the understudied importance of gender and its relation to organizational context in studies of race relations.
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Perspective-taking combats the denial of intergroup discrimination
Andrew Todd, Galen Bodenhausen & Adam Galinsky
Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, May 2012, Pages 738-745
Abstract:
Despite the continuing, adverse impact of discrimination on the lives of racial and ethnic minorities, the denial of discrimination is commonplace. Four experiments investigated the efficacy of perspective-taking as a strategy for combating discrimination denial. Participants who adopted a Black or Latino target's perspective in an initial context were subsequently more likely to explicitly acknowledge the persistence of intergroup discrimination than were non-perspective-takers (Experiments 1-3) or participants who adopted a White target's perspective (Experiment 1). Perspective-taking also engendered more positive attitudes toward a social policy designed to redress intergroup inequalities (i.e., affirmative action), and this relationship was mediated by increased recognition of discrimination (Experiments 2a and 2b). Increased identification with the targeted outgroup, as reflected in automatic associations between the self and African Americans, was found to underlie the effect of perspective-taking on sensitivity to discrimination (Experiment 3). The collective findings indicate that perspective-taking can effectively combat discrimination denial.
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The Impact of Education on Intergroup Attitudes: A Multiracial Analysis
Geoffrey Wodtke
Social Psychology Quarterly, March 2012, Pages 80-106
Abstract:
How does education affect racial attitudes? Past studies focus almost exclusively on whites' attitudes toward blacks, neglecting important minority populations. This study extends previous research by analyzing the effects of education on beliefs about racial stereotypes, discrimination, and affirmative action policies among whites, Asians, Hispanics, and blacks. Results indicate that whites, Hispanics, and blacks with higher levels of education are more likely to reject negative stereotypes, but these effects are less consistent among Asians. And, although education has consistent positive effects on awareness of discrimination against minorities, a more advanced education is not associated with greater support for racial preferences among any respondent group. Education is, however, related to more favorable attitudes toward race-targeted job training. These results are partly consistent with a revised group conflict perspective positing that education unevenly promotes different elements of the dominant racial ideology among nonwhite minorities, depending on their position in the racial hierarchy.
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Derek Avery et al.
Personnel Psychology, Spring 2012, Pages 167-199
Abstract:
This article considers the efficacy of matching the racioethnicity of employees and the customer base as a human resource strategy within service organizations. Despite being advocated widely, the literature on its effectiveness is scant and riddled with conflicting findings. We revisit the theoretical rationale underlying this strategy, formulate new theory, and introduce the demographic representativeness construct (i.e., the congruence between employee and customer base profiles) to the organizational literature to test our hypotheses. Using multisource data pertaining to 739 stores of a U.S. retailer, the results indicate a positive effect of racioethnic representativeness on productivity, which is accounted for by improved customer satisfaction. Moreover, additional analyses showed this indirect relationship to be more pronounced in stores with larger minority customer bases.
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School choice: Impossibilities for affirmative action
Fuhito Kojima
Games and Economic Behavior, forthcoming
Abstract:
This paper investigates the welfare effects of affirmative action policies in school choice. We show that affirmative action policies can have perverse consequences. Specifically, we demonstrate that there are market situations in which affirmative action policies inevitably hurt every minority student - the purported beneficiaries - under any stable matching mechanism. Furthermore, we show that another famous mechanism, the top trading cycles mechanism, suffers from the same drawback.
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Diversity Is What You Want It to Be: How Social-Dominance Motives Affect Construals of Diversity
Miguel Unzueta, Eric Knowles & Geoffrey Ho
Psychological Science, March 2012, Pages 303-309
Abstract:
We propose that diversity is a malleable concept capable of being used either to attenuate or to enhance racial inequality. The research reported here suggests that when people are exposed to ambiguous information concerning an organization's diversity, they construe diversity in a manner consistent with their social-dominance motives. Specifically, anti-egalitarian individuals broaden their construal of diversity to include nonracial (i.e., occupational) heterogeneity when an organization's racial heterogeneity is low. By contrast, egalitarian individuals broaden their construal of diversity to include nonracial heterogeneity when an organization's racial heterogeneity is high. The inclusion of occupational heterogeneity in perceptions of diversity allows people across the spectrum of social-dominance orientation to justify their support for or opposition to hierarchy-attenuating affirmative-action policies. Our findings suggest that diversity may not have a fixed meaning and that, without a specific delineation of what the concept means in particular contexts, people may construe diversity in a manner consistent with their social motivations.
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Racial Diversity, Racial Asymmetries, and Team Learning Environment: Effects on Performance
Robin Ely, Irene Padavic & David Thomas
Organization Studies, March 2012, Pages 341-362
Abstract:
This paper argues that learning in cross-race interactions is critical for work teams to realize performance benefits from racial diversity but that diversity is a liability when society's negative stereotypes about racial minorities' competence inhibit such interactions. We analyze two years of data from 496 retail bank branches to investigate racial asymmetries in the dynamics of team learning and their impact on the link between diversity and bottom-line performance. As expected, minorities' negative assessments of their team's learning environment precipitate a negative relationship between diversity and performance, irrespective of White teammates' assessments; only when both groups view the team's learning environment as supportive - implying that the team has successfully countered the negative effects of societal stereotypes on cross-race learning - is the relationship positive. We conclude that acknowledging the impact of societal asymmetries between racial groups, especially in regard to learning, can reorient research about the link between identity-group-based diversity and performance.
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Different shades of racial colorblindness: The role of prejudice
Philip Mazzocco, Lyndsee Cooper & Mariagrace Flint
Group Processes & Intergroup Relations, March 2012, Pages 167-178
Abstract:
Supporters of racial colorblindness are united by their opposition to racial categorization. However, we suggest that the nature of the relationship between racial colorblindness and racial policy attitudes among Whites varies based on individual differences in racial prejudice. Across two independent samples (Studies 1a and 1b), we demonstrated that colorblindness predicts opposition to affirmative action for low prejudice Whites. For high prejudice Whites, who presumably oppose affirmative action regardless of colorblind concerns, no significant relationship between colorblindness and affirmative action support was found. In Study 2, we examined the relationship between various rationales for supporting colorblindness and affirmative action attitudes, and again detected moderation by prejudice. Low prejudice Whites' evaluations of affirmative action appeared to be based upon perceptions of declining discrimination as well as a concern for balancing the interests of both Whites and minorities. The affirmative action attitudes of high prejudice Whites, in contrast, appeared to be based primarily upon defending the interests of their racial ingroup. The implications of these findings for theoreticians and social justice advocates are discussed.
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Social Energy and Racial Segregation in the University Context
Valerie Lewis
Social Science Quarterly, March 2012, Pages 270-290
Objectives: Universities often promote their diversity as a selling point, but are students of different races at these universities integrated socially? Using theories on social energy, I examine racial segregation among university students.
Methods: Quantitative data were collected on student residence patterns and social groupings formed at lunch tables at a case study university. In addition, interviews were conducted with 25 students.
Results: Students are substantially more segregated than chance predicts. Blacks and Hispanics are particularly segregated. Interviews reveal that these students spend large amounts of social energy coping with prejudice and discrimination as well as functioning in a student culture they find unwelcoming and foreign.
Conclusions: Social energy drains on minority students from discrimination and an unwelcoming campus culture reduce energy left for interracial interaction, making these racial groups more segregated. The study highlights the need for understanding segregation as a function of the interaction of out-group preferences, in-group preferences, and the larger social context.
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Identity Form Matters: White Racial Identity and Attitudes Toward Diversity
Matt Goren & Victoria Plaut
Self and Identity, Spring 2012, Pages 237-254
Abstract:
Previous research has drawn mixed conclusions regarding the relationship between White racial identity and attitudes toward diversity. We propose that identity form may help to disambiguate this relationship. In the present study, White participants wrote brief essays and were grouped based on their exhibition of one of three White identity forms: power-cognizant, prideful, or weakly identified. These groups were then compared on measures of White identification and attitudes toward diversity. A power-cognizant identity was associated with more pro-diversity attitudes than a prideful identity, despite equivalently high identification. A weakly identified form was associated with low identification and relatively neutral attitudes toward diversity. The findings suggest that, when predicting Whites' attitudes toward diversity, identity form matters.